You’ll fall in like with ‘Moulin Rouge!’ as a stage musical
The antic unconventionality of director Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 pop phenomenon “Moulin Rouge!” has been transformed into an eye-and-earpleasing — and altogether conventional — Broadway musical. With a glorious set by Derek McLane, more than 70 pop songs, and dynamic lead performances from Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit, the show is engineered for an evening of easily digested diversions.
The ambitions here in the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in New York City, where “Moulin Rouge!” opened recently, don’t extend to topping what Luhrmann created, with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in the romantic roles of a bohemian writer and a Parisian courtesan. The crazy fusion of contemporary music, operatic hyper-drama and kinetic editing that pegged the movie as the work of a mad auteur would probably have seemed like chaos onstage.
“Moulin Rouge!” is the first splashy entry of the new Broadway season. The audience is welcomed into the scarlet (for passion) demimonde of Paris’s legendarily scandalous nightclub: The signature windmill spins in the balcony, on the left, and the mascot elephant sits on the right. Concentric heart cutouts dominate center stage, which has been gussied up like a gauzy Valentine’s Day card. Welcome, the theater seems to be saying, to the tunnel of love.
The songbook now expands to include classics such as Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” and “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen,” as well as hits such as Beyoncé’s 2008 “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and Lady Gaga’s 2009 “Bad Romance.” The melody lines ring so familiar that the most reliable laughs occur whenever the 15-member band, conducted by Cian McCarthy, cranks up the next tune. Choreographer Sonya Tayeh is a maestro of dance as fever dream, infusing the cancan sequences set to “Lady Marmalade” and the tango to “Roxanne” (all from the movie) with a newfound dazzle.
Kidman and McGregor made a great pair on-screen, but neither was a natural singer. That served Luhrmann’s vision of an innocence radiating out of the core of his plot. But that lack of professional polish would have been fatal on Broadway. Starting with Olivo’s Satine and Tveit’s Christian, and continuing through Tam Mutu’s dastardly Duke and Sahr Ngaujah’s affecting Toulouse-Lautrec, the voices gift-wrap the songbook in consistent pleasurability.
Olivo, a Tony winner for her performance as Anita in the 2009 Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” shoulders the toughest assignment, portraying a sultry chanteuse with a really bad cough who is both tough as nails and a softy. Plus, she has to descend from the rafters looking ravishing in a jewel-studded gown and singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (from the 1949 musical “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”). She accomplishes all this with beguiling ease. You are persuaded that this Satine goes for the squarejawed Tveit, and he and Olivo are temperamentally well matched and make the most of the ever-shifting love-song medley in Satine’s dressing room that’s modeled on one of the movie’s most alluring sequences.
If anything, the show could use a bit more platonically affectionate undergirding for their relationship, because “Moulin Rouge!” remains emotionally unfurnished. The movie’s ironic smirk, assisted by Luhrmann’s exclamation-point approach, has been wiped away. What’s left is a propulsive enchantment that, if you fell in love with the film, as I did, still allows you to fall in like with its follow-up.